Netatmo's Welcome smart home camera can see faces, but needs more smarts

During a recent vacation, I had no fewer than three webcams watching my home. I can’t tell you how comforting it is to be able to open an app, access my Nest Cam (formerly Dropcam) to see my great room or open another app to see compressed versions of the activity in front of my house thanks to Flir FX. Added to that mix was Netatmo’s new face-finding Welcome smart home camera.

Like the Nest Cam and Flir FX, Welcome plugs into a wall outlet and then connects to your network via Wi-Fi. Unlike those devices, it includes facial recognition. As a result, it can alert you when your child arrives home and when an unknown face appears in its 130-degree field of vision.

That is, at least, the promise.

Easy setup

Netatmo Welcome's setup routine is one of the smartest and easiest on the market.

Image: Netatmo

Netatmo’s Welcome starts off strong with one of the cleverest app setups on the market. You just download the free app (iOS 8.3 and above and Android 4.3 and above), plug in the device and then follow the onscreen instructions.

It starts by asking you to turn the 6-inch-tall cylindrical device upside-down. Then you search for an available Welcome device in the app, hit connect and it’s connected to your phone. The last step is letting your phone share your current Wi-Fi settings. The entire process takes about two minutes.

Spec-wise, Welcome more or less matches many of the other home security cams on the market. It offers 1080p video, a microphone, night vision and a wide field of view that it programmatically corrects to remove distortion. Like a traditional web-connected security camera, you can open the Welcome app and see exactly what the camera sees (the delay is 10 seconds or so). But the real magic happens when you let Welcome detect motion and identify faces.

Netatmo, which charges $199 for Welcome but nothing for the service, doesn’t attempt to store all its captured video in the cloud. Instead, the device watches for motion and captures video of the activity, including what happened six seconds before anything moved in front of the Welcome camera, which it’s able to do because it’s always caching video in RAM.

It stores that video on its included 8GB microSD card and discards the oldest video when it runs out of space. You can play back videos from the app. The only content stored in Netatmo’s cloud are snapshots and face captures. One other notable difference is that Welcome has a built-in Ethernet port — useful if you have a network cable port near wherever you plan on placing the device.

The back of the Netatmo Welcome reveals (from top to bottom) a micro-SD card slot, a micro USB charging port and an Ethernet port.

Image: Mashable, Lili Sams

The Welcome app (there’s also an Apple Watch app, but more on that later) offers a live view and a full log of activity, viewable when you drag up on the screen; it logs every motion, face and system activity. The main screen front-loads thumbnail-sized face captures. When you start using Welcome, they’ll each have a question mark on top of them to indicate the faces are unidentified. Tap on one and the app takes you to the exact moment when it saw the face.

If you hold down on the face, you get the option of identifying it, forgetting it or telling Welcome that it’s not a face. In my time with Welcome, it never identified, say, a chair as a face. You can also identify a face as yourself. Once Welcome knows your face, it can tell when you’ve left your home. You can also use the app to set notifications of arrival home for each identified person. You can even ask Welcome to record video when they arrive on a per-person basis, though I think that sounds kind of creepy.

On the other hand, it takes some time and patience to get Welcome to learn all the faces in your home. Even though it saw me, my wife and two teenage children a dozen times after I had named and identified our faces, it still couldn’t accurately say, “Oh, that’s Lance, Oh, that’s Linda.”

Too bright

Netatmo Welcome sees faces (far left) and lets you ID them (middle), but it will struggle if you point it toward a door with too much back light (right).

Image: Netatmo

One possible reason is where I placed the camera. I wanted it watching the front door so that every time someone came in, Welcome would see and identify them. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of backlight streaming in every time someone opens the door. Netatmo does warn that the camera could have trouble seeing faces in too much backlight, but, seriously, what use is Welcome if it can't reliably watch my busiest entrance?

During the two weeks I used Welcome, I got a lot of notifications. How did I know? Because every single one of them popped up on my Apple Watch. Netatmo came up with a great glanceable interface for the wearable device. It’s basically a list of the thumbnail face notifications. When I tap on the face I get a snapshot of the moment Welcome saw the person. I still have to go into the iPhone app to identify people, though. The notifications also became so numerous, that I finally shut them down.

While I waited for Welcome to start recognizing my family’s faces, I started seeing a bunch of other unknown face notifications. At first, I could not figure out who any of these people were, especially because none of them were in the house when Welcome said they were. Then I took a closer look at the faces and realized that I did recognize all of them: They were characters from the Seinfeld TV show.

It turned out that my TV was within Welcome’s super-wide field of view and it was picking up on every face in every TV show and commercials. I tried angling Welcome away from the TV set, but it still managed to see it. It was funny, but not super helpful.

Try to avoid setting up Netatmo Welcome in the same room as your TV. I did and it picked up actors in Seinfeld (left), commercials (middle) and The Big bang theory (right).

Image: Netatmo

Toward the end of my trial run, I accidentally knocked the Welcome device off its perch atop a pair of baskets (I generally tried to steer clear of the device because it gets very hot). It fell roughly a foot and a half onto my hardwood floor. The Welcome’s white bottom popped off, revealing a coil and a wire. I realized that these must have something to do with the upside-down setup routine. In any case, that little accident reset my Welcome.

New Home

I took the Welcome back to the office and set it up as a new device. The really good news is that my account still had my face information in it and, thanks to the better lighting in my office, it finally recognized my face. It also picked up on all my other office visitors.

It’s nice to know that, in the right conditions, Welcome can work, but I still think the device itself could use a bit more work.

While it had a great field of view, Welcome's all-in-one cylindrical body lacks the adjustability of the Nest Cam. Facial recognition is a great, differentiating feature, but, based on my experience, the algorithm needs a little tweaking. Lastly, I think Netatmo will want to work on a Welcome Version 2 that can't be defeated by a strong backlight.

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